Given Ontario students now pay on average well over half of operational costs, the Ford reduction and freeze of fees is insufficient, quantitatively, to change the system’s tuition‐dependent, corporative‐competitive conditions. Short of mass closures, the Ford government’s sharpened financial degradation of public universities is more likely to accelerate the privatization process for better‐endowed universities, while elsewhere precipitating class streaming, quality cuts, program closings, and increased regional disparity.
Despite their declining—yet highly privatized and corporatized condition—Ontario’s public universities remain fundamentally public in terms of assets and control in an overall public system. Indeed, the terms “publicly assisted” and “publicly supported” are misleading in that they suggest the universities are private but receiving assistance, while actually they are still public but being denied adequate public funding support.
